The use of networked systems has become common and widespread as offering greatly enhanced access to and communication between a user connected to a network and other users and resources also connected to the network. As is well known and understood, such networked systems are typically comprised of one or more server/host systems and a number of user/client systems, all interconnected through communications links and communicating through a common network protocol. The user/client systems are typically directly accessible to the network users and the server/host systems typically support and provide resources to the user/client systems and communications between user/client systems and between the user/client systems and the server/host systems.
While such systems can and do use a variety of protocols for communication between the elements of the system, one feature and requirement that is common to all such protocols is a means for individually identifying and addressing the elements of a system, that is, the server/host systems and the user/client systems. The internet, for example and as will be discussed further with regard to a presently preferred embodiment of the invention, uses a TCP/IP protocol in which Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, together with domain names and address masks, are used to uniquely identify each individual server/host or user/client in the network and to control the addressing of the server/host and user/client systems in the internet.
The assignment, tracking and maintenance of addresses for system elements in a network is a recurring problem, however, and particularly in the case of the server/host systems which function as the primary controllers of a system. This problem appears whenever a server/host is newly connected into a network and a network address has not been assigned, whenever an address has been assigned to a server/host but has not yet been verified as valid, and when a server/host has been moved to another network address and its address has not been update, or rediscovered.
A number of mechanisms and facilities have been developed in the prior art to deal with these problems. For example, the IP address for an uninitialized network server/host system has typically been determined through the BootP Protocol, the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), which is an extension of the BootP Protocol, the Reverse Address Resolution Protocol (RARP), or the use of Uni-Cast Ethernet/IP packets, all of which are well known to those of ordinary skill in the relevant arts. In a like manner, DHCP has commonly been used for IP address validation and rediscovery. All of these protocols and methods have proven unsatisfactory, however, as none meet all of the requirements for performing all of the necessary operations. DHCP and BootP Protocol, for example, is inadequate in applications and systems that require that a server/host system be assigned a fixed IP address and in situations wherein a server/host system, such as a World Wide Web server, must be assigned multiple IP addresses.
The present invention provides a solution to these and other problems of the prior art and, while illustrated below for the specific example of an internet system, may be readily implemented for any network based device or system whose primary management interface, that is, the interface through which network addresses are assigned, verified and re-discovered, is network based.